Coldwater Spring GREEN MUSEUM.
A land use vision...

Coldwater Spring has been flowing for 10,000 years, experts say, even under the last glacier. Located atop the Mississippi River gorge, just above the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, the spring furnished water to Fort Snelling for a century and still flows at 100,000 gallons per day.

Coldwater is the Birthplace of Minnesota, where the soldiers who built Fort Snelling lived and where a civilian community developed to service the fort. Those settlers founded Pig's Eye (later St. Paul), St. Anthony, Minneapolis, and Bloomington, setting the stage for Minnesota statehood in 1858.

Before European immigration into what is now Minnesota, the 2-&Mac184; mile stretch from Minnehaha Falls, to Coldwater, to the confluence of rivers, was a traditional gathering place for upper Mississippi tribes. Eddie Benton Benais, Grand Chief of the Mdewiwin (Medicine) Society, and an Anishinabe spiritual elder from Lac Courte Oreilles, Wisconsin, gave court-ordered testimony (3/19/99) about the cultural significance of the Coldwater area:

Coldwater is the largest (and last major) limestone bedrock spring in the Twin Cities. The other sacred spring, Great Medicine Spring in Theodore Wirth Park, was permanently dewatered (along with historic Glenwood Spring) with construction of Interstate 394 in the 1980s.

In 1878, Minnehaha Park was planned as the first state park in the U.S. (second was Niagara Falls). The vision and energy of Horace Cleveland preserved the land “from the falls to the fort.” The fort included Coldwater Spring and all the land from 54th Street, south, to the Mississippi-Minnesota confluence..


Who owns Coldwater?

The 27.32-acre Coldwater campus is owned federally by the Department of the Interior and managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. From 1959 to1991 Coldwater was a Cold War research facility for mining and metallurgy research under the Bureau of Mines. Since the campus closed in 1995 the buildings have been stripped and may be slated for removal. Rehabilitation costs for the 106,000 square-foot main building are estimated at $12  million (in 2002 dollars). The Veterans Administration is using several pole barns at Coldwater for storage.

Coldwater is in the safety zone of the flight path of the newly extended Crosswind runway (4-22) at Twin Cities International Airport. (See attachment 9, number 5 on the map.) Under FAA regulations, land use is restricted by height limits and by ponds of sufficient size to attract water fowl (Coldwater's ducks are okay). Additionally, no large aggregation of people may assemble on the property—no schools, amphitheatre, stadium, or hospital.

The National Park Service is now coordinating a three to four-year process to determine Coldwater's future use. The land may be transferred to another government agency—federal, state or university—but would be best held by the National Park Service, long experienced in preserving and interpreting lands of special interest.

Congressman Martin Sabo, who secured the $750,000 appropriation for the Coldwater process, favors "recreational" use. How recreation is designed at Coldwater will determine if the "sacred" can be accommodated.

Coldwater Spring is included in the spiritual map of the Twin Cities, one of nine Knowledge Maps commissioned by the University of Minnesota Design Institute 2001-2003. "In nature we find the spring from which all spiritual traditions grow." <http://design.umn.edu/>http://design.umn.edu

The bluff land below Coldwater Spring is regional park and state park land. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has an ongoing prairie restoration project there; it would make sense to free the uphill land of invasive, exotic vegetation (for example buckthorn) as seeds tend to move downhill.

In fact, Bill Morrissey, then-director of DNR Parks and Recreation, expressed interest in managing the Coldwater property in a 12/29/01 letter to Tom Holtzleiter of Preserve Camp Coldwater Coalition:

DNR management in partnership with the National Park Service for the Coldwater campus makes sense. At this time federal ownership would provide stronger protections for the environment and Native American rights. It was the state of Minnesota that built a highway through Minnehaha parkland and caused a 30,000 gallon per day drop (so far) in the average flow at Coldwater Spring.

Historical anthropologist Bruce M. White, Ph.D., suggests a larger view that includes Coldwater Spring::

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Green Museum

Green Museum [1] is a concept of preserving a living, changing piece of land. Instead of a building with artifacts inside frames and glass boxes, or a reenactment where history is fixed in time, a green museum is a landscape where change can be observed. Without buildings or roads, Coldwater could become an urban wilderness, a place among burr oaks and prairie grasses where people have gathered for centuries around an ever-flowing spring.

It is astonishing that man's footprint has not crushed this last great spring. Suddenly history speaks, and Coldwater is revealed as the dwelling place of Un Kte Hi, Dakota deity of waters and the underworld. [2] Europeans settled at Coldwater because the water was good. Coldwater is the single emergency drinking water source of size in the Twin Cities that does not require electricity or fuel for delivery.

At Coldwater the spring flows and erodes its way through creek, wetland and waterfall before joining the Mississippi. Coldwater as a green museum would preserve a 27-acre patch of geologically, ecologically and culturally significant land for present and future generations.

Here we can read the story of the land "written" in the rock face of the Mississippi gorge—the only true river gorge on the entire 2,350-mile length of the Mississippi. And we can tell the story of 9,000 years of Native American history and 200-years of European and African-American history. We can teach prairie restoration by doing it.

The Coldwater Spring Green Museum could be the first living museum in the United States. From the spring's 100,000 gallon-per-day outflow, down the 130-foot Mississippi River bluff to the river bank, exists a geologic history lesson 500-million years old, including the time of the dinosaur era from 230 to 65 million years ago.

Human habitation in the area dates to 9,000 years ago with the find of a bison spear point uncovered during the 1996 Sibley House dig in Mendota, just across the Minnesota River. A 6,000-year old stone axe was found south of Coldwater and was donated to the Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota Community.

[1] Why "museum"? Coldwater is museum-quality land, a 10,000-year-old spring, already on the National Register. Coldwater is surrounded on the north, east and south by traditional parks including an historic park (Fort Snelling), a linear park so close to the new highway it is "under-used" (Minnehaha), and a dog park. Coldwater is more than just another park. Museums are where the culture preserves, studies and displays objects of value and lasting interest.

Coldwater as a green museum is a place where the land itself could be featured as a living, changing entity, a place to get away from the anthropocentrism of making the land serve the people. The half-a-billion-year history of the gorge from Coldwater to the Mississippi is a textbook of the human place within the greater ecosystem. Additionally, Green Museum as a "first" brings attention to the place and the concept.


Green Museum Tourism

Coldwater Spring is an acknowledged Native American sacred site. Foreign visitors interested in Indian history are limited to casinos and libraries. There are more than 300 Native American clubs in Germany; German and Japanese tourists are especially interested in aboriginal American history.

Minnesota visitors to Coldwater are not informed that Dred Scott drank the water from this place. Scott, slave to an army surgeon, lived at Fort Snelling between 1836-40. He based his famous 1857 suit for freedom in part on his residency in the "free" Wisconsin (including Minnesota) territory where slavery was illegal. Scott may be the most important African-American to have lived in our state.

Sacred site tourism is a huge industry. Coldwater is a dream historic site because it is still relatively pristine. We have half the state's population in the greater metro area but most urban parks are developed for playing specific sports or for walking/running/skating/skiing through, and are planted with non-native grasses and flowers.

Native history, sacred water, native ecology and global warming, prairie restoration and eco tourism, Dred Scott, Birthplace of Minnesota, photo tourism, birding – are some of the stories Coldwater could show-and-tell.

Coldwater is where history and nature come together in an urban landscape. From Mdewiwin Society rites to the Highway 55 resistance, from a gathering of Indian people, soldiers, missionaries and settlers to Cold War secret research, Coldwater Spring draws people as people draw water. For 10,000 years Coldwater has continued to pour out a bounty of sweet cool water. And now it is our turn to see what we will make of this place.

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The Tourism Crescent

• Downtown Minneapolis – $300,000 riverfront facelift
• White water rafting (proposed)
• Mill City Museum
• University of Minnesota
• West Bank theatre district
• The Green Institute
• Minnehaha Falls
• Coldwater Spring
• Fort Snelling
• Twin Cities International Airport
• The Lincoln Mounds
• Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge and Recreation Area, 13,000-acres, largest urban wetland in America, including the Sand Creek Prayer Stone (a giant glacial erratic near Jordan, sacred to the Dakota people)
• Mall of America
• Mystic Lake Casino and Hotel

Green Museum © Friends of Coldwater, 2004.

Friends of Coldwater sponsors gatherings at the spring most Friday afternoons from 2-3 PM (when the gates are locked), and monthly full moon walks in the area led by various local experts (although the spring is not accessible at night). Numerous school groups have visited the spring. High school summer student-actors from In the Heart of the Beast Theatre picked up two main points from their history lesson at Coldwater. Dred Scott was featured in their play performed at Minneapolis parks. "Give to Get" was the title of one section of the play, referring to the native practice of leaving an offering at the spring before collecting water.

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